Throw up from my brain onto my computer

Month

April 2017

I may have said it before, but I’ll say it again – OneDrive for Business is crap. If fails at its most basic purpose of ensuring files between two repositories remain in sync. I use OneDrive daily at work, and it’ll work fine for a while. After a few weeks the cracks start to show and OneDrive starts to have issues syncing.

To top it off, OneDrive even fails at failing. When something starts to go wrong, it gives you limited information or ability to troubleshoot any issues, leaving you with very few options for resolving problems. Quite often it is impossible to determine the root cause or identify an offending file causing problems. Usually a sync issue results in the need to trigger a “Repair”, which basically copies your local repository somewhere else on your PC and pulls all the files from the server again – not fun, especially when your repository is quite large.

I’ve spent so much time trying to resolve sync issues with OneDrive that I’ve lost total confidence in it. I use Google Drive for my personal files and it is sooo much better. Google Drive maintains sync and gives the user more information about what it is actually doing.

The latest issue I experienced with OneDrive for Business was I noticed it never seemed to finish syncing. When I clicked on the tray icon, it would show a message stating that there were “2 files remaining”. I started to suspect that there was something wrong when this message remained for a couple of days. I set about trying to figure out what was going on and after some googling I found this awesome article by Joseph Spurrier:

Experiencing the exact same problem, using Method 5 outlined in the article above helped me identify the files that were not syncing. I followed up with checking the server repository, only to discover these files had never fully synced and could have been lost – thanks Microsoft!

In order to resolve the issue I then had to manually copy the 2 files to the server, causing OneDrive to finally identify a sync problem due to a mismatch between the remote and local copies. I could then open each file and resolve the sync issue to get OneDrive for Business working again.

All this could have been avoided if OneDrive for Business identified that it wasn’t syncing these files and actually failed, rather than perpetually showing them as syncing.